The retail industry is familiar with the compilation of a shopping list through the use of an optical bar-code scanning system. It also has made use of fulfillment of orders by means of network transmission of data containing the order. However, the retail industry has not solved the problem of the implementation of an integrated means for the return of items. Another problem is that imposed by optical bar code scanning. Commonly used bar codes, e.g. the UPC (Universal Product Code) bar code, contain a limited number of bits of information, ten digits equal to about 32 bits of information. It is desirable to be able to use methods that encode more than 32 bits of information so as to include additional information, such as date of manufacture, date of sale, serial number of the specific item, etc. In addition, while it is common to deduce information about buying patterns of customers from their purchases, information from the return of items also needs to be used for effective data mining.